Category Archives: Analysis

What next after Paris? Time to listen to those most at risk from climate change

By James Dyke, University of Southampton

Pick any day over the past few weeks and the mainstream media would have told you that the COP21 Paris climate change negotiations were crucial and productive, an irrelevant sideshow, doomed to failure, or even humanity’s last ditch attempt to avoid climate catastrophe.

Dig a little deeper into the internet and you will discover that such United Nations events are in fact an attempt to establish a world government, replete with eye-watering taxes.

Conspiracy theories aside, what actually happened in Paris is that humans came up with an agreed plan to put a brake on climate change. We won’t reverse global warming but we should slow it down.

If we don’t come to our collective senses and rapidly reduce carbon emissions, then we will have to revert to drastic geoengineering to rein in further warming. There is no guarantee that such climate brakes will work. If they fail, our civilisation will be on a collision course with a hotter planet.

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How Trump and ISIS help each other

Dominic Tierney writes: At first glance, Donald Trump looks like Islamic extremism’s worst nightmare. Trump said he would ban the billion-plus Muslims around the world from visiting the U.S. He would send the medieval ISIS back to the proverbial Stone Age: “Bomb the shit outta them.” In Tuesday’s Republican debate, Trump underscored his previously stated desire to deliberately kill the families of ISIS members. “I would be very, very firm with families. Frankly, that will make people think because they may not care much about their lives, but they do care, believe it or not, about their families’ lives.”

From another angle, however, Trump and ISIS are effectively, if not intentionally, helping each other. They don’t communicate. There’s no moral equivalence between them. Nevertheless, Trump and ISIS aid each other’s agendas in a strange combination of the coiffured and the caliphate. Even in a Republican Party that has drifted closer to Islamophobia in recent years, Trump stands out for his polarizing rhetoric, which poses a threat to openness and tolerance in the United States. “Terrorists like ISIL are trying to divide us along lines of religion and background,” as President Obama warned recently. “Prejudice and discrimination helps ISIL and it undermines our national security.”

The Trump-ISIS symbiosis reveals a bigger story. International politics often looks like a contest between opposing countries, terrorist groups, and insurgencies. But the hardliners on all sides may be working together—deliberately or inadvertently. In other words, there’s a global confederation of extremists.

“Hardliner” refers to an uncompromising mentality, which lumps enemies together; sees the world in black-and-white, “good-versus-evil” terms; and backs extreme responses to perceived threats. Today, hardliners are often found on the populist right, preying on economic insecurity and fears of terrorism: Trump in the United States, Marine Le Pen’s National Front in France, or Viktor Orban’s “illiberal state” in Hungary. But there are also plenty of hardliners in communist countries as well as in the Islamic world. The ultras — whether they’re in Raqqa, Tehran, Washington, or Tel Aviv — can form a symbiotic relationship. Like tango dancers, the hardliners move in a close embrace, taking steps that facilitate the actions of the other. [Continue reading…]

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America’s gun problem has everything to do with America’s masculinity problem

Elizabeth Winkler writes: After US president Obama’s call for restrictions on assault weapons on Dec. 6, Americans went gun shopping.

That Monday, The New York Times reports that stock prices for gun makers Smith & Wesson and Ruger soared. Guns sold well on Black Friday, too, the day after three people were shot dead at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado and just two weeks after terrorists killed more than one hundred in coordinated attacks in Paris. In fact, gun sales have been rising steadily all year, as though determined to keep pace with the growing frequency of high-profile shootings.

But who exactly are America’s gun owners?

According to a Pew survey conducted in 2014, Republicans are twice as likely as Democrats to be members of a gun-owning household. Gun owners are also geographically spread out: They’re just as likely to live in the Midwestern US (38%) as they are to live in on the West Coast (35%), or the South (34%), debunking the myth that gun ownership is more prevalent in southern states. (In the Northeast, by contrast, gun ownership is lower, at around 27%.)

Above all, though, gun owners are men. It is true that gun sales are rising among women, but a substantial gender gap persists: In 2013, men are around three times as likely as women to own a gun. [Continue reading…]

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Crimes against Muslim Americans and mosques rise sharply

The New York Times reports: Hate crimes against Muslim Americans and mosques across the United States have tripled in the wake of the terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, Calif., with dozens occurring within just a month, according to new data.

The spike includes assaults on hijab-wearing students; arsons and vandalism at mosques; and shootings and death threats at Islamic-owned businesses, an analysis by a California State University research group has found.

President Obama and civil rights leaders have warned about anecdotal evidence of a recent Muslim backlash, particularly in California. But the analysis is the first to document the rise, amid a crescendo of anti-Islamic statements from politicians.

“The terrorist attacks, coupled with the ubiquity of these anti-Muslim stereotypes seeping into the mainstream, have emboldened people to act upon this fear and anger,” said Brian Levin, a criminologist at California State University, San Bernardino. [Continue reading…]

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‘They want something that happens everywhere at the same time,’ says German ISIS returnee

Der Spiegel reports on Harry S., a 27-year-old from Bremen, who may shed light on ISIS’s plans for new attacks: Harry S. returned to Germany from Syria and is now in investigative custody. He has told security officials everything about the brief time he spent with Islamic State and has also demonstrated his readiness to deliver extensive testimony to German public prosecutors. He stands accused of membership in a terrorist group. His lawyer Udo Würtz declined to offer a detailed response when contacted, but said of his client: “He wants to come clean.”

German investigators are extremely interested in the testimony of the apparently repentant returnee, even as they are likely unsettled by what he has to say.

Harry S., after all, is more than just a witness to firing squads and decapitations. He also says that on several occasions, IS members tried to recruit volunteers for terrorist attacks in Germany. In the spring, just after he first arrived in Syria, he says that he and another Islamist from Bremen were asked if they could imagine perpetrating attacks in Germany. Later, when he was staying not far from Raqqa, the self-proclaimed Islamic State capital city, masked men drove up in a jeep. They too asked him if he was interested in bringing the jihad to his homeland. Harry S. says he told them that he wasn’t prepared to do so.

Harry S. was only in IS controlled territory for three months. Yet he might nevertheless become a vital witness for German security officials. Since the Nov. 13 attacks in Paris, fear of terrorism has risen across Europe, including in Germany, and security has been stepped up in train stations and airports. And the testimony from the Bremen returnee would seem to indicate that the fear is justified. Harry S. says that, during his time in the Syrian warzone, he frequently heard people talking about attacks in the West and says that pretty much every European jihadist was approached with the same questions he had been asked. “They want something that happens everywhere at the same time,” Harry S. says. [Continue reading…]

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Book review: Charles Lister’s The Syrian Jihad – a must read that untangles the web of militant groups

Robin Yassin-Kassab writes: Security discourse dominates the international chatter on Syria. Most Syrians see Bashar Al Assad as their chief enemy – he is, after all, responsible for the overwhelming proportion of the dead and displaced. But the Syrian people are not invited to the tables of powerful states, which are in agreement that their most pressing Syrian enemy is “terrorism”.

But there is disagreement on who exactly the terrorists are. Russian president Vladimir Putin shares Assad’s evaluation that everyone in armed opposition is an extremist, and at least 80 per cent of Russian bombs have therefore struck the communities opposing both the president and ISIL.

North of Aleppo, Russia has even struck the rebels while they were battling ISIL. This wave of the “war on terror” – now led, with plenty of historical irony, by Russia and Iran – uses anti-terror rhetoric to engineer colonial solutions, just as the last wave did, and ends up promoting terror like never before.

There is no question that the moderate Syrian opposition exists, in the form of hundreds of civilian councils – sometimes directly elected – and at least 70,000 democratic-nationalist fighters. In a recent blog for The Spectator, Charles Lister, one of the very few Syria commentators to deserve the label “expert”, explains exactly who they are.

Lister’s book-length study The Syrian Jihad: Al Qaeda, the Islamic State and the Evolution of an Insurgency, on the other hand, focuses on those militias, from the Syrian Salafist to the transnational jihadist, which cannot be considered moderate. It clarifies the factors behind the extremists’ rise to such strategic prominence, among them the West’s failure to properly engage with the defectors and armed civilians of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) in 2011 and 2012. [Continue reading…]

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As another activist is murdered, the least we owe ‘Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently’ is our attention

Kyle Orton writes: From the outset of the Syrian uprising, the regime of Bashar al-Assad and the Isis have been united on their strategic goal: eliminate the moderate opposition and make Syria a binary choice between themselves. This is why on the battlefield Assad and Isis largely leave one-another alone and the Assad regime’s propaganda—that the whole rebellion is composed of Islamist terrorists—reinforces Isis’s propaganda claim that it is the only effective protection for Sunnis against the regime. Both IS and the Assad regime are led by military and intelligence officers trained in the KGB and both rely on propaganda as a means of internal control, not only of controlling their international image, which is why both so virulently repress independent media that contradicts their officially sanctioned version. Last night, IS again struck down a member of an activist group that has tried to bring the truth about life under its rule to the outside world. [Continue reading…]

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As Poland lurches to the right, many in Europe look on in alarm

The New York Times reports: In the few weeks since Poland’s new right-wing government took over, its leaders have alarmed the domestic opposition and moderate parties throughout Europe by taking a series of unilateral actions that one critic labeled “Putinist.”

Under their undisputed leader, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, they pardoned the notorious head of the security services, who was appealing a three-year sentence for abuse of his office from their previous years in power; tried to halt the production of a play they deemed “pornographic”; threatened to impose controls on the news media; and declared, repeatedly and emphatically, that they would overrule the previous government’s promise to accept refugees pouring into Europe.

But the largest flash point, so far, has been a series of questionable parliamentary maneuvers by the government and the opposition that has allowed a dispute over who should sit on the country’s powerful Constitutional Tribunal to metastasize into a full-blown constitutional crisis — with thousands of protesters from all sides taking to the streets.

Countries across Europe have seen nationalist movements rise in popularity, particularly in the wake of the refugee crisis and the terrorist attacks in Paris. But Poland’s rightward lurch under the newly empowered Law and Justice Party is unsettling what had been the region’s strongest economy and a model for the struggling post-Soviet states of Eastern Europe. [Continue reading…]

Bloomberg reports: Poland’s government replaced the head of NATO members’ training facility in Warsaw after Defense Ministry officials and military police entered its provisional office after midnight on Friday.

The Counter Intelligence Center of Excellence was staffed with officials who weren’t supported by the Polish government, Deputy Defense Minister Bartosz Kownacki told RMF radio. The ministry appointed Colonel Robert Bala as the acting director of the center, which hasn’t yet been accredited by NATO, an alliance official said. [Continue reading…]

On November 12, AFP reported: Tens of thousands of protesters poured into Warsaw’s streets on Wednesday for a demonstration organised by the far right, marching under the slogan “Poland for the Polish” and burning an EU flag.

Police said 25,000 people joined the march, which marked the anniversary of Poland’s return to independence after the First World War, while organisers put the numbers at 50,000.

“God, honour, homeland,” chanted the protesters as they marched under a sea of red-and-white Polish flags.

Demonstrators trampled and burned a European Union flag at one point, while a banner added to the anti-EU theme with the slogan “EU macht frei” (“Work makes you free” in German), a reference to the slogan over the gates at Auschwitz.

“Yesterday it was Moscow, today it’s Brussels which takes away our freedom,” chanted one group of protesters.
Other banners read “Great Catholic Poland” and “Stop Islamisation”. [Continue reading…]

Ivan Krastev writes: The new government has pushed forward three staggering changes. The man chosen to oversee police and intelligence agencies is a party stalwart who received a three-year suspended sentence for abusing power in his previous role as head of the anti-corruption office, signaling that political loyalty is above the law.

The government has purged European Union flags from government press briefings, demonstrating that it sees Polish national interests in opposition to European values.

And it has weakened the country’s separation of powers by rejecting the previous Parliament’s nominees to the constitutional court — and instead appointed its own candidates, provoking a constitutional crisis.

Why has Poland, the poster child of post-Communist success and Europe’s best economic performer of the last decade, suddenly taken an illiberal turn? Why, despite the profound public mistrust of politicians, are people ready to elect parties eager to dismantle any constraints on government’s power?

For one thing, the Law and Justice Party bet on a form of illiberal democracy because it succeeded in Hungary. The Orban model of rebuking the European Union while accepting billions in aid money has worked. So have Mr. Orban’s efforts to consolidate power by demonizing his political opponents. Hungary’s economy has not collapsed as critics predicted; nor did Mr. Orban’s party lose at the ballot box. [Continue reading…]

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Russia’s family business

Reuters reports on the rewards Kirill Shamalov gained after marrying Vladimir Putin’s daughter, Katerina, in February, 2013: Within 18 months, Kirill acquired a large chunk of shares in a major Russian oil and petrochemical processor called Sibur – a stake now worth an estimated $2.85 billion, based on the value of recent share deals. He also quit his job as a business manager and set up a company to run his personal investments.

How did such a young businessman go so far, so fast? A Reuters examination of Shamalov’s career shows that in the summer of 2013, months after he married Putin’s daughter, Kirill opened discussions about buying shares in Sibur from one of the president’s wealthiest friends.

A year later, he was able to borrow more than $1 billion, judging by the published accounts of his investment company. The loan came from a bank headed by another longtime associate of Putin, and where Shamalov’s brother holds a senior position. The money was used to make an investment in Sibur that within months proved highly profitable for Kirill.

Asked about his business deals and the wedding, Kirill Shamalov and Sibur declined to comment.

The trajectory of Kirill’s fortunes sheds new light on how people close to Putin have taken commanding positions in key companies – and how such opportunities are now being extended to a new generation. [Continue reading…]

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Pete Seeger’s FBI file reveals how the folk legend first became a target of the feds

David Corn writes: From the 1940s through the early 1970s, the US government spied on singer-songwriter Pete Seeger because of his political views and associations. According to documents in Seeger’s extensive FBI file—which runs to nearly 1,800 pages (with 90 pages withheld) and was obtained by Mother Jones under the Freedom of Information Act—the bureau’s initial interest in Seeger was triggered in 1943 after Seeger, as an Army private, wrote a letter protesting a proposal to deport all Japanese American citizens and residents when World War II ended.

Seeger, a champion of folk music and progressive causes—and the writer, performer, or promoter of now-classic songs, including as “If I Had a Hammer,” “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?,” Turn! Turn! Turn!,” “Kisses Sweeter Than Wine,” “Goodnight, Irene,” and “This Land Is Your Land”—was a member of the Communist Party for several years in the 1940s, as he subsequently acknowledged. (He later said he should have left earlier.) His FBI file shows that Seeger, who died in early 2014, was for decades hounded by the FBI, which kept trying to tie him to the Communist Party, and the first investigation in the file illustrates the absurd excesses of the paranoid security establishment of that era. [Continue reading…]

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Conspiracy America — where Trump already rules

Ben Judah writes: Trump is a son and hero to Conspiracy America, a country where academic studies show 40 per cent of citizens believe the US government is covering up the cure for cancer, a republic where 25 per cent believe the “Birther” conspiracy he helped to create, and nearly 20 per cent believe the “Truther” conspiracy that al-Qaeda fanatics were not responsible for the 2001 attack on the Twin Towers. Why do so many Americans believe such fabrications? This is the most urgent question for America today.

The paranoia fuelling Trump’s rise is the curse of the Bush era. Conspiracy America is a delayed reaction to the twin Bush disasters: the War on Terror and the banking collapse. History warns us that fear of demonic plots builds slowly after confusing, traumatic events. And once a conspiracy theory is born – The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, for example, or the power of the Freemasons – it is nearly impossible to kill.

Conspiracies about the Kennedy assassination built slowly, peaking in the 1980s. Germany’s “stab-in-the-back” myth grew only slowly after the Treaty of Versailles, peaking in the 1930s. History warns that paranoia about plots thrives in states which are being delegitimised: whenever they are unable to fulfil their promises – of empire, welfare, or the American Dream – the pattern of history is those losing out see plots, not systems, stealing what was theirs.

America’s shifting racial structure and social-media addiction may be far less to blame for Trump’s popularity than the rightists of Washington would like to admit. Conspiracy theories are able to thrive in atmospheres where the government has embraced the rhetoric of “us and them” – just as the War on Terror produced. Above all, the history books tell us, conspiracy theorists such as Trump thrive in societies that are growing poorer, weaker, more unequal, and where their citizens do not understand why that is happening. And that is America today. [Continue reading…]

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Pentagon officers: We will quit if Trump wins

The Daily Beast reports: Republican presidential candidate and business mogul Donald Trump has repeatedly vowed to build up the U.S. military if elected president.

But it is not clear he will have the experienced commanders within the ranks to do it.

In the halls of the Pentagon, there is a different plan afoot for the Trump presidency. Here, officers are privately contemplating what they would do should Trump become their commander-in-chief. And more often than not, they proclaim they will leave.

“By 2016 I will have my 20 years in and can get out of here,” one military official said, referring to the amount of time a service member needs to collect retirement pay.

Spend enough time with a service member, and the topic of Trump comes up, always unsolicited. It is far less political than it sounds. Trump’s attack plans for the so-called Islamic State widely known as ISIS — his call to ban Muslims from the United States, his suggestions that cutting off the flow of information through the Internet can protect the homeland — many said, are an affront to the values they vowed to die to defend. [Continue reading…]

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Five years after Bouazizi, the Arab Spring isn’t over

Faisal Al Yafai writes: Without a doubt no one expected this. Five years ago this week, when Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in a small Tunisian town, no one, absolutely no one, could have imagined the Middle East would look like it does today.

The Middle East has been living with the reality of the Arab Spring and, in some countries, the post-Arab Spring for nearly half a decade, to the point where it has become the new normal. It can be hard to remember what it was like before.

Hardly surprising, then, that the Arab Spring divides opinion. The progression of the revolutions in each of the five countries have gone in very different directions. Some, like Egypt, have found themselves back on track. Tunisia, where it started, is doing well. Libya, Yemen and Syria, much less so.

In situations of such cruelty and complexity, it is easy to imagine that what existed before was better. That the revolutions, as some would have it, “failed”.

And, certainly, looking at the dire situation for ordinary Syrians, watching as ISIL attacks Kurds and Yazidis, or as ordinary Libyans and Yemenis suffer in countries without the rule of law, looking back to a period of stability is seductive.

But it is worth recalling that the Arab Spring wasn’t an event. It wasn’t a single, static moment. It was months and years of decisions, of responses, of actions and reactions.

If the Arab Spring revolutions didn’t always turn out better for the people, that isn’t the fault of those who revolted for a better world. It’s often the fault of those who spent money, manpower and bullets to prevent that world coming about. [Continue reading…]

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On the need to listen to Arab public opinion

Commenting on the results of a recent Zogby poll of over 7,400 adults in six Arab countries (Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE), Turkey, and Iran, Rami G. Khouri writes: As expected, people in Iraqi are divided on their views of their own national institutions and regional players’ actions in their country. Sunnis mostly lack confidence in the Iraqi military, Iran’s involvement, or the Popular Mobilization Units that are fighting “Islamic State” (ISIS), while Iraqi Shiites support the actions of all these. The more significant finding, however, is the “remarkable consensus” on two important issues: that the cause of the conflict in Iraq is that, “the government in Baghdad does not represent all Iraqis,” and that, “the best way to ultimately resolve the conflict…is forming a more inclusive representative government” — and not partition, with the Kurds also supporting such a representative central government.

I would guess that this Iraqi desire for inclusive, representative governance within a unified national framework is mirrored in most Arab countries that are wracked by war and sectarian tensions, like Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, Lebanon, and Syria. Ordinary citizens probably hold much more rational and constructive views on how to resolve those conflicts than the warlords and officials, not to mention foreign powers that now mostly shape policy.

The poll found that ISIS was mentioned as the most serious extremist problem facing the region in every country except Jordan, where Al-Qaeda is ranked first. More interestingly — and significant for counter-terrorism purposes — is that in most countries polled citizens identified, “corrupt, repressive, and unrepresentative governments” and, “religious figures and groups promoting extremist ideas” as the most important causes of religious extremism. [Continue reading…]

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Extinguishing the flames of the Arab Spring

Al Jazeera reports: Five years ago today, Mohamed Bouazizi, a 26-year-old street vendor, set himself on fire outside a local municipal office in his hometown of Sidi Bouzid to protest against police corruption – a solitary act that would set off a stunning chain of events throughout the Arab world.

In the years since Bouazizi’s death, Tunisia has gone through tremendous change. After street protests forced President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali into exile after two decades of his rule, Tunisia adopted a new constitution and held national elections in 2014.

Earlier this month, the country’s National Dialogue Quartet was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for assisting Tunisia’s transition to democracy.

But despite the changes that have taken place around them, residents of Sidi Bouzid say their lives are no better than they were before the uprising.

“Before the toppling of the regime of Ben Ali, we had hopes,” Ramzi Abdouli, 29, a graduate from Sidi Bouzid, told Al Jazeera. “We thought that maybe when Ben Ali left our reality would change. Unfortunately, it was not the case.”

Like many of Tunisia’s youth, Abdouli participated in the 2010-2011 protests, hoisting banners against the regime. Even after Ben Ali was deposed, Abdouli marched more than 250km from Sidi Bouzid to Tunis in April 2012 to reiterate demands for social justice and employment.

Today, via social media, he remains a relentless critic of the current government and its political affairs – and is pessimistic about the years ahead. [Continue reading…]

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Iran’s pivotal elections could be decided next week — two months before anyone votes

Bobby Ghosh writes: With barely more than two months to go before what may be the Islamic Republic’s most important elections in a generation, there are no visible signs of campaigning in the streets of Tehran. One reason: the Iranian political cycle is, perhaps mercifully, much shorter than the American one. But another reason emerges in my conversations with politicians, clerics, and businessmen. There’s no electioneering, at least not the kind you see in most democracies, because nobody can be entirely certain who is running.

Registration of candidates opens tomorrow, Dec 17. But the fate of many aspirants will be decided within a week — long before the voting begins — by a small group of clerics and jurists, known as the Guardian Council, who are constitutionally tasked to ensure that the Islamic Republic remains true to its religious ideals.

Under the Iranian system, candidates for any election must first be vetted by this 12-member body, which has, since the founding of the Islamic Republic, been controlled by the country’s Supreme Leader—first ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and now ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The Guardians also have veto power over any legislation enacted by parliament, and most of the decisions of the country’s president.

This makes the Council a powerful instrument by which the Supreme Leader can head off political and social reforms at the pass, by preventing reformists from standing for elections, or perform an end-run around any attempted reforms by the legislative or executive branches.

Iran’s February elections are for two powerful institutions: the 290-member Majlis, or parliament, and the highly influential, 86-member Assembly of Experts. The latter is especially important this time around because its mandate is to select, supervise, and, at least in theory, remove the Supreme Leader. It has an eight-year term, twice the duration of parliament, so this particular Assembly will likely play the pivotal role of deciding who gets to succeed Khamenei. [Continue reading…]

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Russia’s goals in Syria

Joseph Bahout writes: it would be premature to assume that there is a grand design behind Russia’s Syrian intervention. It is more realistic to envision what Putin has in mind as a series of incremental endgames, a succession of contingency plans, and a cascade of defense lines, in a Russian nesting doll fashion, that are adaptable and playable as events unfold on the ground and on the diplomatic battlefield.

The first and most highly valued of these objectives would be the restoration, to the greatest extent possible, of the central Syrian state such as it existed before 2011. Putin bets on a revamping of the Syrian army, which relies on cadres trained (and sometimes married) in Russia or the ex-Soviet bloc. This objective does not exclude a whitewashing of the regime’s façade through early elections, the formation of a “national unity government,” and cosmetic revisions of the president’s prerogatives. That is probably what Putin discussed with Assad during his recent and very odd visit to the Kremlin.

If this proves impossible or too costly, a second option is to fall back to the defensible parts of useful Syria after guaranteeing the safety of the Alawi canton. This is perhaps already a consideration, as the majority of Russian airstrikes concentrate on the contours of this area. From there on, Putin, like in Ukraine and Crimea, could freeze the conflict and embark on a long war of attrition. The rest of Syria would fragment and fall into chaos. The central desert would be left for the West and the Gulf States to sort out, fought over by various rebel groups and the Islamic State, which would prosper in such a scenario. Russia’s expectation is that its rivals would ultimately be exhausted and come back to Putin begging for a solution—the one that he always had in mind.

The last contingency scenario is to seek to make the second option quasi-permanent. Useful Syria would be solidified as an enclave into which minorities would progressively flow, seeking protection or shelter from the chaotic rest of the country. This would become the launching pad of a negotiated long-term solution that would consolidate the partition of Syria, granting Moscow influence over a statelet on the coast, where its military bases lie. While the economic viability of such a region would be uncertain, it could potentially be ensured by the exploration and exploitation of undersea gas fields. [Continue reading…]

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Video: Debating Syria’s future

Panel discussion held on November 23, 2015 in Denver at the Annual Meeting of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), featuring (in order): Sarah Leah Whitson of Human Rights Watch, James Gelvin of UCLA, Joshua Landis of the University of Oklahoma, and Najib Ghadbian of the National Coalition of Syrian Revolution and Opposition Forces, moderated by Danny Postel of the University of Denver.

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